Blood Toll. Don Pendleton

eased Han to the floor and went to the outlet. Working a knife edge behind the plastic outlet cover, Bolan popped it off with a hard snap of his wrist. Inside the outlet was a white plastic square. The Executioner removed and examined it. He was holding a card key to a room at the Holiday Inn Waikiki.

      “Hid it there,” Han rasped from the floor, “when they first threw me in here….”

      “Jimmy?” Bolan said, taking Han by the shoulders again and lifting him to a sitting position.

      “James,” Han managed to say. “James…”

      Bolan could barely hear the man. He leaned in close. “Jimmy,” he said. “James. Talk to me. What is this key?”

      “Five…” Han said softly. “Five-nineteen. Five-nineteen…”

      Bolan watched as Han’s bloody, swollen face went slack. One of his eyes was swollen shut; the other turned glassy as the light behind it faded. A death rattle passed through his split lips. Bolan lowered the operative to the floor one last time and closed his staring eye.

      Pocketing the key, Bolan rose. His first priority was to escape Cheinjong. He had been too late to save Jimmy Han; he could not afford to let Han’s message die with him. Beretta held before him, he slipped out the office door and back the way he’d come, stepping over the unconscious door guard as he went.

      The conference room door opened. There was a pause, followed by alarmed voices shouting in Chinese.

      Bolan kept walking, rounding the corner at the end of the corridor. He had almost made the stairway when the first gunshot rang out. The Executioner broke into a run, throwing himself down the stairs and across the machine shop, the floor above and behind him echoing with running footsteps. He caught a glimpse of his pursuers as he crashed through the fire doors to the loading dock. At least half a dozen men with pistols and subguns were chasing after him.

      When the soldier’s combat boots hit the loading dock, the fire alarm inside began to ring like a school bell. This was obviously a signal to the sentries outside, who began to converge on Bolan’s position in response to the noise. One crossed Bolan’s field of fire and received a 3-round burst from the suppressed 93-R. The Executioner headed straight for the body, stepping over it without breaking stride and hurling himself at the perimeter fence.

      As he scaled the fence, two more sentries caught sight of him. Bullets burned past him as he rolled over the barbed wire topping the fence, hitting the ground on the other side with a grunt. He snapped another pair of bursts back at the sentries as automatic fire sprayed the ground where he’d been. Cheinjong’s guards were willing to use overwhelming deadly force in broad daylight on American soil. As Bolan ran for the nearby commercial buildings, putting distance between himself and the shooters, he wondered why they’d been so quick to cross the line. Something big was going down, something Jimmy Han was trying to tell him.

      Bolan’s rented Dodge Charger sat where he’d left it, in the narrow alleyway between two neighboring warehouses. The 3.5-liter engine growled when he turned the key. Leaving black marks on the asphalt, he guided the car through the alley, shooting out into traffic as he watched the rearview mirror. When two minutes passed with no sign of pursuit, he concluded he was not being followed.

      Steering with one hand, Bolan removed his secure wireless phone from an inner pocket of his blacksuit. The scrambled line buzzed as he connected to Stony Man Farm, cycling through a series of encrypted cutouts. After a brief delay, Barbara Price was on the line.

      “Striker?” Stony Man’s mission controller sounded tense. “What’s your status?”

      “Jimmy Han is dead,” Bolan told her. “Beaten to death. Cheinjong Industrial Supply is staffed by Chinese-speaking Asians packing automatic firepower. They cut loose on me as I was leaving.”

      “I’ve got Honolulu Specialized Services Division standing by,” Price said.

      “Tell them to move on Cheinjong as fast as they can get into position,” Bolan said. “But don’t count on that being fast enough.”

      “Striker?”

      “They’ve got some kind of manufacturing operation going,” Bolan explained. “It looks professional, which means they’ll have planned for discovery. I wouldn’t be surprised if SSD finds nothing but empty rooms and half-eaten lunches.”

      “I’ll do what I can to speed it up. What about you?”

      “I’ve got a lead,” Bolan said over the throaty roar of the Charger’s engine, “but if this starts to get complicated I’m going to need local backup. Has Bear finished looking over my HPD contact?”

      “He has,” Price said. “Your liaison is Sergeant Diana Kirokawa. She’s been commended for closing a number of high-profile murder and violent-assault cases. Thirty-six years old, fourteen years with the department. Half-Japanese, Hawaiian born. I’m transmitting an image and her data file to your phone now.”

      “Thanks, Barb,” Bolan said. “Contact HPD and see if you can have her meet me at the Holiday Inn Waikiki, soonest. I’m headed there now. Also, get a courier into position at that location. I have something I recovered at Cheinjong that I need to have analyzed ASAP.”

      “Will do. Striker?”

      “Yeah?”

      “Be careful.”

      “Always.” He closed the phone and pressed the accelerator, sending the Charger surging forward.

      Jimmy Han had died for whatever was in that hotel room. He wouldn’t die for nothing.

      Not if the Executioner had anything to say about it.

      2

      The lobby of the Holiday Inn bustled with tourists in bathing suits and bright floral prints. With his gear concealed and the blacksuit camouflaged under a light gray windbreaker, Mack Bolan could move without drawing too much attention. Bypassing the front desk, he found the nearest stairwell access, his combat boots ringing on the fire stairs as he ascended.

      The fifth-floor hallway looked clear as Bolan stepped quietly to room 519. Jimmy Han’s card key prompted the electronic door lock to release with a faint click. Bolan checked the hallway again, drew his suppressed Beretta 93-R and let himself in. He checked each room. There was no one inside.

      Bolan went back to the door and set the dead bolt. Then he holstered his weapon and began searching the room methodically. It took him half an hour to toss the room thoroughly. He was satisfied that there was nothing in the room that would not normally be present. The small hotel room safe was empty. No messages of any kind had been left behind on any surface that the soldier could detect, either. He’d even tried running the shower and sink with the bathroom door closed, the hot water turned on full blast, but there had been no final words written by Jimmy Han on the mirror, cryptic or otherwise.

      The Executioner’s eyes fell on the Gideon Bible. He picked it up. Just before he died, Han had said, “James.”

      Bolan thumbed through the Bible to James 5:19. On the page in which the verse appeared—appropriately enough, it concerned saving a wayward soul—he found a scrap of paper. Written in very fine point pen, almost too small to read, was a series of numbers completely covering the scrap of paper. The numbers meant nothing to him. He placed the paper on the end table underneath the lamp and took a photograph using the camera in his secure wireless phone. Then he transmitted the image to Kurtzman at Stony Man Farm, with a brief text message: “Found this. Decode?” Finally, he tucked the paper carefully inside an inner pocket of his blacksuit. He checked the Bible once more, just to be certain, then replaced it.

      There was nothing more for him here. Bolan turned to leave but stopped just before the doorway. He’d heard something on the other side. Nothing was visible through the door’s peephole, however. Drawing the Beretta 93-R, he reached out and slowly, quietly turned the dead bolt.

      The force of the door slamming into him knocked